Ex-RCMP intelligence executive who leaked secrets should spend at least 28 years behind bars: Crown

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OTTAWA – Prosecutors want ex-RCMP intelligence director general Cameron Ortis sentenced to the maximum prison term possible to “send a message” after he was found guilty of leaking top secret information to suspected criminals. 

Speaking in an Ottawa courtroom Thursday, prosecutor Judy Kliewer told judge Robert Maranger that she is asking for Ortis to spend at least 28 years behind bars for his “betrayal” of Canadians and their intelligence allies in 2015. 

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What Ortis did “betrayed domestic intelligence partners and Five Eyes intelligence partners. It jeopardized the safety of Canadians because this kind of conduct put at risk the ability of Canada to keep receiving information it needs to keep Canadian interests safe,” Kliewer argued. 

In November, a jury found Ortis guilty of all six charges against him, including four under the Security of Information Act (SOIA) for leaking or attempting to leaking secrets without authority to suspected criminals. 

The jury found that he had leaked or attempted to share sensitive information from the RCMP and Canadian and allied intelligence agencies to suspected criminals in 2015, including three potential members of a multi-billion-dollar money laundering network. The fourth SOIA charge was for leaking information to Vincent Ramos, a B.C. businessman who sold encrypted cellphones to organized crime. 

They did not believe the former top RCMP intelligence executive’s story that he was on a covert mission on behalf of an unnamed foreign agency. 

The four SOIA charges come with maximum sentences of 14 years. Kliewer proposed that Ortis spend 14 years in prison for leaking to Ramos and another 14 years for the leaks to the three suspected money launderers. 

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Ortis’s lawyers are scheduled to make their sentencing arguments after Kliewer. They are expected to argue that Ortis has already spent enough time behind bars to fulfill his sentence (he spent three years in prison before his trial). 

Kliewer used her pleadings Thursday to emphasize how dangerous, reckless and damaging Ortis’s actions were to the RCMP, his colleagues, intelligence-sharing allies and Canadians. 

As then-head of the RCMP’s Operations Research unit, he had virtually unlimited access to Canadian police and intelligence agency records as well as information shared on the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network (comprising the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand). 

“His position entrusted him with the keys to the most sensitive information that the RCMP had access to. It was he who had the working everyday knowledge, everyday access to the most sensitive information,” Kliewer said. 

“He violated all of the trust, rapport and linkages, relationships that he’d built in the course of his employment with the RCMP”, she added. 

Ortis’s verdict marked the first time a person in Canada was ever charged, tried and successfully convicted under Canada’s current espionage law. It was the culmination of a four-year case that has kept Canada’s national security community in suspense since Ortis’s shocking arrest in 2019.  

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That means Ortis’s sentence needs to act as a warning to other potential leakers in Canada, Kliewer argued. 

She said the sentence needs to send a message to Canada’s intelligence partners that “we can protect your information, and if we don’t, there will be a very significant consequence,” she said. 

“If the consequence … today is not significant, that promise to our partners is hallow,” she added. 

More to come.

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